Amused and Alarmed

would not eat monkey brains, probably

Underslept, and therefore pessimistic all day. In general, when I'm tired, I feel like a crouched down, eyes slitted gremlin who doesn't exactly want to hiss at everyone from under a rock - it's annoying how all these people keep walking by and making me hiss, which I don't exactly want to do. (I don't actually hiss. I'm mostly pleasant.) The situation is dramatically better once night falls; before that point, I'm dealing with the fact that I'm a night owl who didn't want to be up that early anyway (where "early" means 2pm), which becomes excruciating when I'm also tired. Whereas once it's around 7pm I'm tired but happy to be here.

Although I spent the day irrationally grouchy and anhedonic, the "this is not working" work I got done actually worked quite well and now my fairly complicated AV setup I need for the job I'm restarting on Thursday is functioning the way it should, so I don't have to live in terror that I will have to break a contract and be devastatingly poor, and can instead make nice money doing a thing I like. Also, I bought an adapter for a lamp that's been unuseable for months, and have gotten superglue with which to repair the huge stack of other things that need to be re-adhered. These are currently in a pile in a cabinet, because in my experience superglue only works the first day you open it. I intend to do hours of gluing tomorrow or Sunday.

But the really nice thing is that I got an e-mail from somebody important at the Smithsonian museum of American history saying they'd like to use a funny piece of mine about presidential insult nicknames. I don't know what they mean about wanting to use it - tweet about it? print it out? keep it in an archive? tack it up in the office? - but of course I have said yes (with the exception that I've given The Awl exclusive rights for two weeks), because my highest dream in life is to quietly contribute minor scholarship to exactly them. I blame Indiana Jones.

[Update: It's stuck to the wall next to the desk of one of the curators, as a helpful reference. Huttah!]